Herodotus’ Laughter: Media and Aesthetics in Greek Science and Geography

During my fall 2025 fellowship at the CHS, I carried out research and writing for a new monograph that explores the cultural contingency of form in ancient scientific textual traditions. My project, Herodotus’ Laughter: Media and Aesthetics in Greek Science and Geography, investigates four case studies (from the 5th c. BCE to the 2nd c. CE) to explain how cultural aesthetics shaped how authorities used verbal and visual media to make claims about the world and nature. The textual traditions of Greek science and geography have been transmitted in a primarily verbal form, but I argue that we must not take these appearances for granted—Herodotus, Aristotle, Claudius Ptolemy, and Hellenistic poets describing the world in verse certainly did not. Their writings variously embrace or reject experiments with visual forms of knowledge: maps, diagrams, and verse forms that mimic the textual display of prose. What opportunities or hazards motivated these choices of textual form?

Recent decades have seen a growing interest in the textual forms of ancient science, and foundational work has addressed definitions of genre, the construction of an authoritative persona, and the cultural contingency of style in scientific discourse. But specialized, scientific disciplines also stand out for incorporating visual media such as maps as essential elements, which pose a special challenge to study: while diagrams and other illustrations appear in the manuscript traditions of the exact sciences and occasional papyrus finds, our knowledge of these media largely stem from descriptions and other verbal references embedded in textual traditions. A number of scholars have done foundational work in defining the range and form of these media through careful textual criticism and source analysis. At the same time, many have also investigated the epistemological and rhetorical importance of visual media within particular genres and domains of ancient scientific discourse, opening up questions about what visual media reveal about ancient modes of thinking and how they complement verbal discourse in the construction of authoritative claims.

Yet much of this analytical work has focused on genres and contexts where diagrams or other visual media are expected features. There is still no monograph that investigates visual media where they are novel, controversial, or precarious, or the contingent pressures that prompted critiques or justifications of them. But building on the work that scholars have done to situate ancient scientific practices in their cultural context, we are now in an opportune position to explore fundamental questions about why scientific textual traditions looked the way they did: What cultural factors inhibited the emergence of visual scientific media in the 5th c. BCE? Under what conditions did they emerge? What textual forms were developed to compress and convey vast amounts of knowledge of the world and its parts? Why and how did a visual scientific culture persist in the face of more efficient forms of communication? These are the questions my project aims to answer.

My monograph explores how fundamental choices of medium were negotiated and theorized by authors, ranging from Herodotus to Ptolemy, who aimed to communicate vast and complex bodies of knowledge about nature and the world. The title is drawn from Herodotus’ derision of maps (4.36.2), our earliest extant critical engagement with the form of scientific media from Greece. Herodotus thus sets the agenda for the book, and as a writer at the intersection of various proto-fields like geography and natural philosophy, he opens up questions of knowledge, form, and aesthetics that my book explores to understand the lost visual media that he and later writers engage with. In turn, as I investigate these absent media, my book models new ways of understanding these canonical authors. In the effort to recover lost works and epistemologies, the book supplies a richer context within which to read the texts that we do have.

The CHS fellowship gave me the opportunity to develop two major sections of the project. First, I completely revised and expanded the first chapter, which analyzes Herodotus’s laughter at maps and argues for a new approach to the historiography of early Greek cartography. The chapter shows how maps failed in a cultural context that prized vivid performance, and the analysis undertaken at CHS revealed significant rhetorical and performative dimensions in Herodotus’s geographical exposition that had been overlooked or underappreciated in earlier scholarship. Second, I expanded the argument of my second chapter, which shifts the focus to Aristotle’s philosophical school, an environment in which images succeeded as components of scientific discourse. This chapter analyzes Aristotle’s statements about anatomical diagrams and other images to draw out the significance of visual media for Aristotle’s investigation of the life sciences.

My overall experience at the CHS had a profound impact on my project, in ways both anticipated and unexpected. The residency insulated me from (most of) the distractions of other professional obligations, and being able to get almost any book I needed in under a minute from the CHS’s library stacks allowed me to make steady progress throughout the fall (and I am extremely grateful to the CHS librarians, who quickly acquired resources that were not already in the library’s exceptional holdings). Moreover, the CHS’s generous support has enabled me to travel to Boston for research and Maynooth for an upcoming conference. The support that the CHS offers to scholars such as myself who have not yet secured a stable position really cannot be overstated, and I hope that the CHS continues to find ways to expand this privilege to many others.

There were also impacts more particular to my own project and experience. Exhibitions in D.C. museums, such as “Little Beasts: Art, Wonder, and the Natural World” at the National Gallery of Art, serendipitously helped me understand better how my project is implicated in a wider history of scientific media. And not least, I am fortunate to have been part of a lively and supportive community of fellows, administrators, and staff, with whom I enjoyed stimulating conversations over lunch, around the grounds, and on excursions into D.C. and the wider area. I look back at my four months at the CHS as a time of good fellowship, thanks to which I got good work done.